There's a shift, and suddenly he can't feel much of anything. There's something solid and cool under his arms, his chest (possibly why he's not flat on his back on the floor), and an echoing distortion that's messing with his senses, screwing with his information uptake.

He can't breathe, for a long moment.

Sam--Samantha--is next to him, then, asking what happened.

"I don't know," he tells her, and that's the moment he does know.

He gets his feet more or less under himself and stands there while she goes off to check things out. Makes himself take deliberate breaths. Leans on the stone of the weapons console, trying to regain his balance. Trying, trying to get used to the sense of negative space that's short-circuiting everything. It's familiar, but it's been almost six years since he lived like this, and God, it's disturbing.

I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, he catches himself thinking. I should never have asked this of you. Never. It's a lie. He couldn't have done anything else. Selmak would be the first to tell him that. It was only tradition and generosity (and love) that had prompted any other suggestion.

And then weeks of repeated argument, since he could be as stubborn about using their shared gifts to the last moment as Old Wise One could be about sparing the life of his host.

The needs of the many, though; they both understood that. The arguments had ended in shared purpose.

And they were right. They had won.

That soaring thought finds no echo, dropping into the void without even a subconscious response.

Selmak. Please. He hasn't used his name for years, not between the two of them, not in their own head. It does no good now; he's begging an almost-corpse, and he knows better.

This is heartbreakingly beautiful. As much angst as we see in canon and fanon about the host of a Goa'uld, there's relatively little exploration of what happens when a willing host loses the symbiotic friend who literally lived in his head. Poor Jacob and Selmak, and thank you for the wonderful writing :)

Thank you for the wonderful comment! What you said is exactly why this grabbed me so hard--Jacob/Selmak is one of the weirdest and most functional friendships in canon, and they're a host/symbiote pair, which just makes them even more rare, and the loss of them even more heartbreaking.

That soaring thought finds no echo, dropping into the void without even a subconscious response.

How absolutely sad and indeed lonely. I never gave Selmak's death much thought because I was so caught up in losing Jacob, but his grief must have been intense - losing his constant companion and savior while trying to say goodbye to his beloved daughter.

\o/ Thank you! That's exactly how I felt it should be; I recently rewatched "Threads," and what jumped out at me was that Jacob knew this moment was coming, and so...shocking, yes, but duller than that and in some ways more painful (nothing to blunt it, that phase mostly dealt with already).